"Time and renewal wrestle / In my body," writes Applewhite ( Foreseeing the Journey ), and this volume takes that struggle as its subject. Both nostalgia and rage accompany a return to a childhood home; a flying lesson awakens a sense of liberation and a terror of death. Some works succeed wholly, with lines of arresting beauty: "Help me father, I say as in prayer, to hear / A son's new testament, fairer writ." Applewhite uses off-rhyme perceptively, and his language varies from sparse assertions to dense description--but these techniques do not compensate for evasiveness. A poem about a father does not fully address the feelings of the son; a delicate discussion of the heart that juxtaposes cardiology and love fails to twine these two threads. In other works, the problems are more basic: characters, locale and action are obscured to no apparent end; the language is nonspecific ("The landscape moving itself becomes the source / Of my being"), overstated or cliched, or reverts to a personal, hermetic shorthand.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In these poems Applewhite struggles to come to terms with memories of his family--especially the father who dominates these poems--with his Southern heritage, and with what both have made of him--and he of them. As he says, "I heal the past as I can." Poems like "Good as Dad," "Back Then," and "Working Around the Grease Rack" employ a folksy good-old-boy diction that rings true and renders the emotions of the poems more convincing, while less colloquial attempts like "The Conversation" seem to strain too hard toward the mythic. Though the poet may admit, in a poem to his mother, that he "hated that you and the place the South were one . . . ," he also retains a love for both the people and the place, and the tension between those contradictory emotions makes for complex and moving poems.
- Grace Bauer, Virginia Polytechnic Inst., Blacksburg
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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